Outlier Ventures’ State of Blockchains Q4-2018 report: user adoption increasing

Pedestrians at Bay and King Streets, with the Bank of Nova Scotia building in the background, Toronto, Canada. The intersection of Bay Street and King Street is considered the heart of Canada’s financial industry. Outlier Ventures’ Toronto office is located at 372 Bay Street, Suite 506.

Outlier Ventures, one of the leading blockchain and Web 3.0 venture capital firms, has published the Q4-2018 report in its State of Blockchains series, reporting that despite declines in token prices, there were strong signs of product adoption in the final quarter of 2018.

The quarterly report series provides an overview into blockchain investment and market trends the world over.

According to an email CoinReport received from Fire on the Hill, Outlier Ventures’ PR company, tokenized web browser Brave leads the pack with a remarkable five-fold increase in average monthly users. Moreover, the company entered into an agreement with well-known mobile phone manufacturer HTC to become the default browser on their handsets.

Some statistics on Brave include:

• 28,000 verified publishers, who form part of the Brave tokenized ecosystem where users are rewarded for their attention when consuming advertising.
• More than 10 million Android users downloaded the browser in 2018, with mobile users representing 80% of the firm’s total users.
• 5 million unique monthly users – which represents 5X growth.

Outlier Ventures partner and head research Lawrence Lundy-Bryan said on the occasion, “We are witnessing an increasing number of teams launching products and seeing early signs of traction. 2019 will likely witness a handful of blockchain projects beginning to rival traditional web companies for adoption. Consumer choice will be between centralised offerings, and their decentralised competitors. The last two years has been about the infrastructure needed to build these products, the next two will be about scaling and attracting users.”

Other findings of the report include:

• Decline in ETH price likely is not the result of a rush by blockchain startups to sell ether raised during their ICOs. The price declined steadily through 2018 from circa $1,200 in January to a low of $80 in December, but a snapshot analysis of 50 prominent blockchain startups’ ICO wallets revealed just modest ether selling, with 3.7% of the total ETH supply remaining locked-up in ICO wallets by as late as September 2018. Blockchain startup ICO wallets kept on holding, on average, about 37% of tokens raised in ETH by 2018’s end.

Outlier Ventures research analyst Joel John said, “Many in the community believed that ETH’s drastic decline was due to heavy selling pressure from start-ups selling ETH raised during ICO, but the numbers show otherwise. It’s more likely that ETH’s price simply declined with entire market, perhaps being oversold on the fear of a stalling ICO market.”

• Enterprise blockchains saw significant growth in 2018’s fourth quarter, with such projects keeping on gaining traction in areas like blockchain-as-a-Service provision. Some highlights of enterprise blockchain projects in Q4, 2018 include:
  • The Linux Foundation’s open-source blockchain initiative, Hyperledger, added Deutsche Telekom, Citibank, Alibaba Cloud and 12 more members.
  • The ‘Juncker Plan,’ an initiative by the European Commission to transfer €360 million to Spanish SMEs, utilized the Hyperledger blockchain.
  • R3 raised $150 million from Singapore’s Temasek to further develop its Corda blockchain, demonstrating the willingness of more conventional investors to support corporate offerings.
  • A custom procurement to pay solution for Thailand’s Siam Bank was deployed by Accenture on R3’s Corda blockchain. The system tracks the sale of goods, collection of payments and registers financing.

Image credit – Rémi Carreiro from Toronto, Canada (Source: Rushing)  (CC BY-SA 2.0)